My Two Susans

had a lovely lunch today with susan love, who wrote DR. SUSAN LOVE'S BREAST BOOK with me as her co-author, and her wife and daughter. We've been in touch sporadically over the years, but the last time i saw her in person was, i think, about 20 years ago. she has recently had leukemia, and her bone marrow transplant has had great results. i had known of susan before i actually met her through one of her patients who was a dear friend of mine and died in 1991. before her death, susan shapiro founded the women's community cancer project. when i got home, in the mail was a form letter from the project, announcing its closing. saddening. but it lasted all these years and helped change the face of how cancer affects women on many levels, and the importance of researching environmental factors. so ending my day with thoughts of my two susans and their magnificent fights against cancer....

TV's Recent Gems and Near-Gems

you lose some, you win some.  for a few weeks, my sunday evenings were two hours of pure television bliss. from 8 to 9 there was PBS's exquisite mini-series, Last Tango in Halifax Lord, what a refreshing show! the plot sounds pure Hallmark: 2 elederly widowed people who were in school together 50  years earlier meet again when alan's young grandchild persuades him to look for celia on facebook.  they meet again, each admits that they were in love with the other back then, and have remained so ever since, and decide, after an hour of wonderful conversation, to get married.  their middle aged children are appalled, then supportive.

but this was far indeed from a hallmark movie. the two, played magnificently by derek jacoby and ann reid haven't a trace of adorable codger about them.  they are adults who are in their  late 70s, and have grown and lived over the years.  their daughters too are complex adults, both with troubled lives that their parents can't change. at first hostile to each other, they become fast, supportive friends.  Alan's daughter Gillian is a widow with a strong libido; celia's daughter caroline is recently divorced fro her philandering husband and is having an affair with a female colleague in the university where both work. neither is at all discomfited with her new friend's sex life, nor is alan.  celia, in other ways a strong liberal, is rigidly opposed to her daughter's relationship with a woman, nor can she handle the idea that caroline had enjoyed her marital sex life before she kicked her husband out for his infidelity. needless to say, the series treats both the daughters' sexual lives without a hint of exploitation.  nor are we expected to react with distaste to the openly sexual nature of the elderly couple's relationship.  sex, like all the realities of life, lives gently in this homey, comfortable world.

all of this  makes celia's obstinate fury to caroline's lover startling, as it is to alan, and in fact nearly destroys his love for her.  his liberalism, even more than hers, is core deep, and probably a lot closer to left than liberal.  it's also matter of fact, a core-deep humanity that opposes people hurting each other.   for celia, the realization that she has injured not only her beloved daughter but also the man she is in love with, shakes her enough to make her confront her own bigotry and approach caroline's lover with a heartfelt apology.   yep, a happy ending, with not a smidgen of saccharine. for the fans of the show, there's an equally happy ending: a second season of the series will be shown next summer.

TV is rarely this good with elderly characters, and in america, at least, on the rare occasions when it is, the show seldom succeeds. {I  don't know how this plays out in England, except that the BBC also had a hit that pbs aired in the early 1990s--a broad, hilarious sitcom called Waiting for God, which was set in a retirement home run by a money hungry jerk named harvey baines [or, as residents Diana and Tom refer to him ''the idiot baines'']. Diana fights baines and all he stands for with militant wit and anger; she had s pent her life as a photojournalist, covering wars and politics.  Tom is a gentle soul, given to playing with people's perception of him as demented.  he lives a rich fantasy life, closing his eyes and becoming a john wayne character, or james bond, or whatever hero of whatever fantasy he has crafted. when pulled away from his escape world, he cheerfully apologizes for being preoccupied and explains that he has been busy making passionalte love with veronica lake.  these two characters are opposite versions of resistance, and their attacks on the idiot baines and all he stands for are marvelous funny, in the face of a literally morbid world, in which people are sent to age into death. like alan and celia, they become lovers, and they don't marry only because diana is opposed to the institution of marriage. so they live in sin happily as long the gods allow.

the US has had its elderly heroes, though the one that always gets touted, Murder She Wrote, is really about a middle-aged character.  Judging Amy [about which i'll write another time] was one of those grandly progressive tv shows that flourished for some reason in the early 21st century, and though Amy was as youthfully beautiful as you could hope for,  one of the two crucial barely secondary characters was her mother, played by tyne daly, one of our truly fine actors.  maxine, in her 60s, is bolder and less rule-bound than her daughter, a social worker fighting passionately for the rights of the throwaway children her jobs connects her to. widowed, she falls in love with a man her age, played by richard crenna.  there are a couple of fairly explicit bedroom scenes with the two,  in one of which maxine leans over him, pulling the pins out of her bunned hair, so that it falls sensually over his face.  again, no cute codger there.  [more about amy and the brief golden age of the early 2000's on a later post.]

recently we did less well with nbc's  harry's law,' with Kathy Bates, in which an aging female lawyer named Henrietta fights the good fight--interestingly, from a conservative perspective.  the show lasted barely two seasons.

this post started out with the topic of my sunday night tv shows, but it's already too long. so another time for drop dead diva, which ends its current season in two weeks, leaving me not totally bereft since a small cable station, wbin, is airing reruns of the too-soon-canceled leverage.  that too will appear with DDD and probably the puffy spy show covert affairs, which has oddly become my favorite just-for-entertainment show in recent months. stay tuned....

Hooray for Me!!

As most of you know, i've taken up writing 'flash fiction' these past few months.  Not sure why; they just started coming into my mind,  and seemed happy there.  Along with the 'series' ones, like the   India Footlock group [which has so far underwhelmed both my blog and facebook readers} are severally self-sustained short-short stories.  The most recent one i wrote for a specific publication that wasn't accepting any new stories except for christmas themed ones. i figured that gave me a chance so i wrote a story, based on the rag-doll Jesus i've written poems about in the past.  the publication promptly rejected it, alas, but i trudged onward [you can tell the depression had ended because i haven't done much trudging for a couple of years], and just as promptly as the first online mag rejected it, the second accepted it.  the publication is called Linguistic Erosion, and appears daily.  "The Jesus Ragdoll" will be published on the first page, on Christmas day.

The cynic in my soul reminds me that I've published books, for heaven's sake, and articles galore, at least in the old days.  but it's been a long while between bylines, and as i said, i'm new at flash fiction. so i'm feeling a mild version of what i felt over 50 years ago when my first poem was published in a small poetry mag.

i will remind you closer to the time so you can prepare to spend about 2 minutes of the christmas season reading a brilliant bit of flash fiction.  [and of course will publish here my yearly xmas card poem, but it won't be a poem this time: i guess i'm hooked on flash fiction...]

In 14 hundred ninety two...

Honesty prevents me from wishing you all a happy Columbus day.  but i wish you a day away from work, and the prayer that in 100 years or so from now, our descendants will being taking off to celebrate a happy End of Colonialism Day.  so in case we don't all make it to that day, that's what i wish you now:



MAY YOU ALL HAVE A HAPPY AND GLORIOUS END OF COLONIALISM DAY!

INDIA FOOTLOCK CONTEMPLATES PARALLEL LIVES

this is the latest complete India Footlock tale. i have been hesitant to put it here b/c the 2 friends who read it didn't get it, so it may just be weird.  but i haven't posted here much lately, so i thought i'd see if anyone else got it, liked it, hated it, or whatever

‘Speaking of such things,’ Gloria remarked one afternoon, when we had not in fact been speaking of such things at all, and hadn’t been for several weeks [she had, like all of us, picked up India’s habit of non sequiter, which consisted of suddenly hearkening back to a conversation from weeks or month ago], ‘what do people think of the notion that each of our lives exists simultaneously on several different planes that don’t know about each other?  Like a kaleidoscope where each possible combination of stones already exists when we see the one that seems to come up alone?”

India nodded.’ So that each possible thing that might happen to you in a given instant actually is happening in its own realm.’

Uh-huh,’ Gloria nodded.  ‘Only it’s much more complicated than that, because most things that happen to you happen between you others—like the eight of us sitting here. And so that each possibility that could exist for every one of us exists on planes that are both individual and collective.  Like, reimer here has dozens of possibilities, but in some of them he’s with us, and others not. and each of us too has dozens of possibilities, some of which include the others.’’

‘well, in at least one of these possibilities, I’m getting dizzy,’ muttered Joel.

‘she’s quite right, you know,’  India said firmly. "The possibilities are endless, and quite intriguing.  And when you think further than in some of our other-planes, we are different ages or races or temperament, because each possibility for each person carries a separate history.  For instance,’ she turned to me, I assume because I was sitting next to her. ‘On one plane, you and I could be young lovers, gently touching each other for the first time.’

I gulped, and joel snickered. much as we all loved India, her place in our hearts was as a more genteel and subversive version of Auntie Mame, not as a hot young woman.  And yet, even as I thought this, a vision shimmered through a scrim of not-quite-fantasy, and there was a young, thin, fragile india, dressed in an opaque negligee, her arms around my neck and her small, firm breasts pressing into my chest, as I trembled in my first, awkward caress, while outside, india’s voice continued in its usual neutrally cheery tone.  ‘’of course, we could as easily be a pair of hungry rats tearing each other to pieces over a scraggly bit of some long-rotting animal corpse.’’

‘eieuw,’ said Gloria, and joel laughed: ‘india, I never knew you were a romantic!’ the others, myself among them, rushed to change the subject.  Yet the feeling that remained with me the rest of the day was neither of our lightly but caringly bonded group nor the ghoulish brutality of the starving rats.  It was a slight and contented erotic tenderness to a girl I’d never seen but somehow had known well, and I wondered what was happening between those lovers who might have been india and me and who I knew I’d never see again.

A Whole Week Un-depressed

i can't believe it!  thank the gods for Abilify!  after 2 years, what a relief!

happy birthday keith

today would have been my kid brother's 66th birthday; he died at 33.  it still hurts not be able to tease him about his balding, or being a grandfather, or any of the other signs of old age.  i still miss him.

and, in the sometimes dreary life-goes-on motif-- today is the 3rd day in a row in which, though hardly happy, i'm not actively depressed.  keith would be happy for that.....